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ISPRS 1998 Getting to know SPICE

The SPICE ancillary information system developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory offers a flexible, multimission suite of data containers and related software--a subroutine library--for producing, archiving, distributing and accessing much of the "ancillary" data used in space science mission design, observation planning and data analysis. SPICE handles ephemerides of spacecraft and target bodies, target size/shape/orientation, spacecraft orientation, instrument field-of-view geometry, sequence of events and time conversions. SPICE software is portable to nearly any platform, has an open architecture and is freely distributed. SPICE is used on essentially all NASA planetary missions, and has been applied in the astrophysics, space physics and earth science domains as well. It was ready for use on the Russian Mars 96 mission and is available for any other international application.